Stephen Jay Gould quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Stephen Jay Gould

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Top Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Browse top 49 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Stephen Jay Gould.

Favorite Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

1. "If we use the past only to creature heroes for present purposes, we will never understand the richness of human thought or the plurality of ways of knowing." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

2. "We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility. Organisms inherit a body form and a style of embryonic development; these impose constraints upon future change and adaptation. In many cases, evolutionary pathways reflect inherited patterns more than current environmental demands. These inheritances constrain, but they also provide opportunity. A potentially minor genetic change […] entails a host of complex, nonadaptive consequences. The primary flexibility of evolution may arise from nonadaptive by-products that occasionally permit organisms to strike out in new and unpredictable directions. What "play" would evolution have if each structure were built for a restricted purpose and could be used for nothing else? How could humans learn to write if our brain had not evolved for hunting, social cohesion, or whatever, and could not transcend the adaptive boundaries of its original purpose?" ~ Stephen Jay Gould

3. "In Darwins post-platonische werelds is de variatie de fundamentele werkelijkheid en veranderen berekende gemiddelden in abstracties. We blijven echter de voorkeur geven aan het oudere en tegengestelde standpunt: we zien variatie nog steeds als een massa onlogische toevalligheden, die hoofdzakelijk van waarde is omdat zo'n spreiding te gebruiken is voor de berekening van een gemiddelde, hetgeen we dan beschouwen als iets wat een essentie nog het best benadert." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

4. "Science is no inexorable march to truth, mediated by the collection of objective information and the destruction of ancient superstition. Scientists, as ordinary human beings, unconsciously reflect in their theories the social and political constraints of their times." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

5. "We should therefore, with grace and optimism, embrace NOMA's tough-minded demand: Acknowledge the personal character of these human struggles about morals and meanings, and stop looking for definite answers in nature's construction. But many people cannot bear to surrender nature as a "transitional object"--a baby's warm blanket for adult comfort. But when we do (for we must), nature can finally emerge in her true form: not as a distorted mirror of our needs, but as our most fascinating companion. Only then can we unite the patches built by our separate magisteria into a beautiful and coherent quilt called wisdom." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

6. "The originator of an idea cannot be held responsible for egregious misuse of his theory." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

7. "Scientific questions cannot be decided by majority vote in any case." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

8. "Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

9. "When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

10. "In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

11. "I would not choose to live in any age but my own; advances in medicine alone, and the consequent survival of children with access to these benefits, should preclude any temptation to trade for the past. But we cannot understand history if we saddle the past with pejorative categories based on our bad habits for dividing continua into compartments of increasing worth towards the present. These errors apply to the vast paleontological history of life, as much as to the temporally trivial chronicle of human beings. I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur is succumbing to progress. Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium. Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects, entirely self-imposed, for extended geological longevity." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

12. "I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

13. "At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

14. "Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn't be serious." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

15. "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

16. "No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

17. "Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

18. "Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

19. "We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

20. "Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

21. "I had learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success. We had maintained, even exaggerated, this important flexibility of our primate forebears, while most mammals had sacrificed it in specializing their digits. Carnivores run, stab, and scratch. My cat may manipulate me psychologically, but he'll never type or play the piano." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

22. "We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

23. "Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among million; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

24. "This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

25. "Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

26. "My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha" -- while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

27. "Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny — and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do)." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

28. "Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

29. "Some fifteen to twenty Burgess species cannot be allied with any known group, and should probably be classified as separate phyla. Magnify some of them beyond the few centimeters of their actual size, and you are on the set of a science-fiction film..." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

30. "The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor — not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies "out there" in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

31. "We pass through this world but once." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

32. "We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

33. "The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

34. "What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

35. "Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

36. "Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as 'the intelligent layperson' does exist - in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

37. "The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

38. "Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

39. "All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

40. "Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

41. "If I don't make it, I'll be very sad that there are things I didn't do, but I'm happy that I've done what I have." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

42. "With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

43. "I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

44. "Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

45. "The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

46. "Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

47. "Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

48. "The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

49. "The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning." ~ Stephen Jay Gould

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